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Tech entrepreneur, CEO of Tesla and xAI, Elon Musk, has announced an important upcoming update of xAI’s Grok AI chatbot. However, while doing so, he cited his own popular tweet published four years ago, in 2021.
Back then, this tweet became one of those Twitter posts that some analysts wanted to sue Musk for, alleging that he was engaged in manipulating financial markets.
"Stonks" tweet brought back by Grok Imagine; Bitcoin
In his tweet, Musk announced a soon-to-launch upgrade when Grok will be able to say words in a human voice. He published a 6-second video (the maximum Grok Imagine can do so far) depicting the “Stonks” meme character. This is a popular Internet figure that often depicts someone making poor financial decisions or misinterpreting market trends. This video-making feature is the most recent innovation that has been rolled out by the xAI team and it combines text, image, and video-generating features in a single app.
The bald figure stands confidently in front of a surging stock market chart, talking without any sound. Back in 2021, Musk posted several tweets, among them were “Stonks!” and “Gamestonk”. The first one was related to the stock market (a slang term for stocks), the second one to the stocks of a particular company - Gamestop, which soared after Musk mentioned them in his tweet. Platforms were forced to suspend trading GME. Before that, he added Bitcoin to his bio section on Twitter, pushing the BTC price way upward: a whopping 20% in a single day.
SEC loses Tesla case to Musk
In the same year, a group of worried investors alleged that Musk was manipulating markets by just tweeting about certain companies’ stocks or BTC. Back then, the tech mogul was in the middle of a lawsuit filed against him by the SEC after his 2018 tweet about Tesla stocks: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
Eventually, the Securities and Exchange Commission lost the case.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team